New paper: revealing land control dynamics

Putting land claiming on the map reveals that the footprint of agricultural frontiers extends far into seemingly ‘intact’ forests.

In ‘Revealing land control dynamics in emerging agricultural frontiers', LENDEV lab's Olivia del Giorgio and colleagues develop a novel remote sensing and GIS approach to map and analyze the land claiming activity that takes place before large-scale deforestation for agriculture.

Applying the approach to the Gran Chaco, the authors not only found land claiming concentrated around active deforestation fronts. They show that claims fragment areas that, based on land-use change indicators alone, would be considered largely ‘untouched’ by agricultural activity.

In exposing the spread of land claiming across the Chaco their analysis shows intense land pressure on smallholders there: where land claims were highest, homesteads disappeared most—both in deforested zones and in remote forested areas.

Beyond being an application useful going forward for the Chaco, the methodology can be used to detect land claiming indicators across contexts. It therefore opens opportunities for monitoring the early stages of commodity frontiers across tropical and sub-tropical forests globally.

Find the article here.